Retrospectica: Occupy mobilizes where vote mobs falter

There was a small uptick in the number of youth voters in Canada this past May. About one per cent or so. Overall, however, the trend is still bleak — a downward slide that some worry is leading to an overall disinterest and degradation of the democracy we hold so dear.

Knowing that trend, CBC comedian Rick Mercer took it upon himself this past spring to encourage students to get out the vote and, as an extra step, do it as a mob.

The vote mob meme, though brief, appeared encouraging. Videos flowed on to the web, featuring university students from all over the country running around their respective campuses with cardboard signs held aloft in sync, and it all looked pretty good, if a little contrived and cheesy. But then, when the day finally came, everyone just kind of stayed home.

So what went wrong? There are lots of theories, mostly surrounding the idea that Gen Y would prefer to engage in symbolic gestures, such as clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook petition, rather than actually putting the time in to go to a voting station and check a box in real life. As for joining in the political process as an active member of a party, you can basically forget it.

Which leaves us no closer to solving the problem of youth voter disengagement, and if anything, has only added one more. Having tried, and failed, to encourage each other to mob the vote, young Canadians may now be even more cynical than before, and even more convinced that nothing is going to work when it comes to political engagement.

Then, as if on cue — either for those who believe this generation is only capable of the grand, meaningless political gesture, or for the others who are convinced there’s activism in those young hearts — a group of people started gathering in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street, setting up camp, and refusing to leave.

There are still questions as to whether the Occupy movement will have any kind of long-term effect on politics, either globally or even at a national level, thanks in part to its own inherent ambiguity.

From the beginning, the Occupy movement has been intentionally vague, mostly in order to allow for a range of topics to be discussed at the open forum general assemblies – the meetings held daily that operate by consensus earned in relatively organized silence, with a series of hand gestures denoting acceptance or rejection of any given proposal for the group’s next move.

The fact that it was such an apparently nebulous movement lent credence, in Canada particularly, to the argument that it was accomplishing nothing; that it was simply disparate groups of disaffected left-wing voters annoyed that, despite its success in May, Canada’s left had just as little power after the election as it did before, if not less.

It was equally dimissed as a nothing movement from a lazy generation whining about being disenfranchised, even when they never bothered to use the power afforded them by their democracy. This seemed especially true in Canada, which remains quite well off and lacking the deep social inequalities or corporate hijackings that occurred south of the border.

In other words, the 99 per cent in Canada were perhaps raging against the wrong 1 per cent – a misdirected, adopted grievance from the usual influencer, the United States.

Occupy ’11[start_gallery][end_gallery]

Yet, unlike the vote mobs that dotted the country in the spring, Occupy still seems to have some life, if delayed slightly by the temperatures.

Winter appears to be the only thing that slowed the Occupy movement, and even then, only somewhat. Protests continue here and there, even in Canada, where demonstrators recently attempted to shut down the Vancouver port. Like any protest movement since the French Revolution, climate will dictate the ebb and flow of the Occupy demonstrators. Spring will tell a new story.

For now, Occupy has, arguably, accomplished at least one thing. It has managed to change the conversation — something vote mobs attempted, but at which they ultimately failed.

The difference between the two is perhaps as simple as the fact that vote mobs pushed youth back to the system from which they already felt disenchanted. Occupy, on the other hand, recognized that disaffection and offered the concept of an entirely alternative system, somewhere on the other side of a few internet photos.

Occupy used the same base concept as vote mobs: become adopted by a demographic that likes to chat, whether literally via Twitter, Facebook or text message, or figuratively, by simply posting a video to YouTube to alter the course of the discussion.

And, in some ways, that’s all that was necessary. People were asked to show up, take part as much or as little as they liked, but compelled to upload the video or live tweet. It was simple to become part of the conversation, and the only choreography — voting en masse in front of police, rather than behind a cardboard partition — felt purposeful, not cheesy. It was happening in the Right Now where youth have always lived, not in the long-promised prosperous Later that, it appears, will offer much less to Gen Y than it delivered to their parents.

Vote mobs offered youth the opportunity to vote on a piece of paper, on a specified day, for something they thought they might need at some point. Occupy offered the idea of voting with Twitter, right now, for something immediate. It was never going to be a contest.

In short, to many, Occupy felt relevant.

As such, Occupy became something entirely different than a simple plea for interest. That was actually the easy part. After that, it became a new monster, thanks to the kind of engagement it promoted, and an understanding of what actually motivates its target audience. Since then, it’s morphed into a kind of early warning system relentlessly repeating its message from the centre of a broken system that, deep down, seems to know it will get a lot sicker before it becomes healthy again; the conscience of an economic system destined to experience yet-unknown life changes.

“It seems reasonable to think,” Hunter S. Thompson pondered in the wake of the late 60s culture shift, “that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”

Where a quasi-movement like vote mobs failed to make anyone talk about politics differently, Occupy has done exactly that. It has changed the way virtually everyone in Canada and the United States is now talking about its most specific target, the economy. Income disparity, corporate negligence, the concept of a homegrown plutocracy — these are ideas no longer relegated to fringe elements, but are beginning to be discussed widely, along with the idea that there maybe some rot developing at the core of the current system. With that accomplished, Occupy will likely hibernate happily.

As for the voting booths, they still await the day young faces start outnumbering old ones. Though perhaps not for much longer.